Saturday, May 02 2020

Good morning, everyone! Happy Saturday. It’s an obscenely beautiful
day today, which is why this morning I’m coming to you live from my
back porch. Marissa is sitting beside me trying to curb her maternal
nausea with a Hy-Vee blueberry muffin, and Rodney is trying to snipe
birds off the Burger King roof with his rifle shaped stick - ope,
sorry… his shooter.

It took a while to get set up outside. About half way into drafting
my notes for this morning’s entry, the maddening number of typos I was
leaving behind made me realize that the E key on my Macbook keyboard
is stuck, and was working about a half of the time. So with coffee
cup still in hand, I dashed upstairs to grab my cable and mechanical
keyboard.

Did you know I’m a bit of a keyboard snob? I use a machine called the
Happy Hacker Keyboard, best known for its compact layout, smooth
action, and unbelievably sexy thunk-thunk-thunk sound it makes when
you type. This is probably the first time I’ve used it outside, and
I’m really getting a kick out of it.

Sip. I had a great day yesterday. My morning was filled with the
usual meetings as well as picking off the last few environment
variable migrations. I took a break just before lunch to practice
baseball with Rodney, then we returned inside for story time.

On Friday afternoons, we’ve hosted a virtual story time with Rodney’s
cousins. I take the call from my bedroom office, and Rodney uses
Mom’s laptop on the couch.

If you’ve never had the chance to watch a group of toddlers talk to
each other over Zoom chat, I highly recommend it as a source of
amusement. Rodney caught on pretty fast, and apart from occasionally
shouting into the tiny laptop speaker, he demonstrates pretty good
Zoom etiquette. Alice, at first, didn’t realize what was going on,
and I’m pretty sure she just thought that I was the host of a strange,
low budget TV show that aired in her kitchen every week. I’m not sure
what Frankie thinks of it - she’s difficult to read.

After reading the riveting classic Giraffes Can’t Dance (spoiler
alert - they can!), we bid the cousins farewell and I continued on
with the work day. My tedious project of the day was setting up my
calendar with sixteen weeks of vacation mode. After submitting the
changes, my boss sent me a slack message.

“I just got about 200 emails from you through Google calendar,” he
said. “My inbox is buried.”

“LOL,” I replied. “I would hope that Google Calendar would be smart
enough to not send you an email for each event I declined, but sadly
that’s not the case?”

“What would have happened if you clicked ‘decline all future events’,”
chimed in Nate. “Would it have sent him infinite emails?”

I finished out the work day, attending some final meetings, and with a
final “have a great summer everyone!”, I signed out of work slack.
The catharsis of leaving work for sixteen weeks manifested itself into
a nap, and immediately after I drew the shades, crawled into bed, and
passed out until dinner.

I woke up to Rodney poking at me from the foot of my bed. “Dada -
Dada - Dada,” he yelled, leaping onto my stomach. “The pizza is
here.”

“Well that’s weird,” I grunted, crossing my legs to absorb the brunt
of his tiny body slam. I sprang out of bed and tackled him. “Then
why does it smell like CHINESE FOOD downstairs,” I yelled, reversing
him into a leg lock.

Marissa had set up the takeout Chinese food at the table, and the
steaming pile of fried rice and nearby mound of dark and syrupy
General Tsao’s chicken looked so welcoming and glorious. And after
coming out of a long nap? That meal was like an out of body
experience.

After dinner, we made our way to the couch to wish Gigi a Happy
Birthday. The Birthday wishes quickly turned into a round of
questions for Rodney.

“You gotta get him out of there!” replied Gigi. Rodney quickly ran
over to his toys and we all looked on with anticipation. He returned
with a shirt full of plastic power tools.

“Ah,” said Marissa. “I think he’s going to try to use his power tools
to get Miles out.” From his bag of tricks, Rodney produced a battery
powered skil saw. And even though it was just a plastic toy, in that
moment, held to Marissa’s thin, swollen stomach, it looked pretty
menacing. Rodney squeeze the trigger, and the tiny engine clicked.
We roared with laughter as he holstered the toy saw, grabbing a
plastic pliers instead.

“Nice dude,” I said, egging him on. “I would focus on the belly
button, that’s got to be the weak point.”

Rodney cycled through his plastic toys - the pliers, the hand saw, the
hammer. At one point he even played his recorder, as if he was going
to lure Miles out of the womb like a snake charmer.

After putting Rodney to bed, Marissa suggested we have a bonfire. We
set up some chairs around the grill, and before long we were sitting
under a shared blanket watching the fire flicker. Ziggy crawled into
Marissa’s lap, strategically angling her body against the fire.
Marissa and I sat outside and shared a long, meandering conversation
about Rodney, pregnancy, coronavirus, and politics.

As we were cleaning up from the campfire, Marissa doubled over,
wincing in pain. I helped her over to the couch, where she remained
for the rest of the night clutching a plastic bowl.

“I think nausea is a pre-labor symptom,” she said. “I think
something’s going on in there.”